Return to the Garden

Mother Earth is beginning to shake us off like a dog does to mud and water and fleas.

What we do is causing Earth’s shaking. We call these self-created incidents unintended accidents although we are deluged with facts which say differently. We refuse to connect this with that. We ask the engineer to correct our designated “mishaps” rather than change the basic notions of how to live.

We are not horrified at being labeled “consumers.” Our ability to adapt to the impossible has consequences. It was eating the forbidden apple that caused God to throw us out of the Garden. What was in that apple? I imagine the ability to detach ourselves from life so that we can consume it. It is the hungry consumer’s “mouth” which banishes us still.

The Gaia vision shows that all things are interconnected. We nix that. We treat Earth’s living parts as “things.” Destroying the part unravels the whole. All life is connected. One energy. As a result of our incursions, life is held together by fraying strings.

Let us look at a few of our attacks on the web of life. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to impress the Russians. Now Fukushima, victim of a tsunami is spewing radioactivity into air and ocean but we refuse to discuss it. We fear our knowing “fear” itself as well as a reprisal for speaking the truth by the nuclear industry. Our silent mouth destroys us. We napalmed the Vietnamese which poisoned their land for generations. We poisoned the soldiers who dropped our napalm and then refused them medical care. People who do our catastrophic bidding are treated as “things.” War is a tremendous money maker. Those who sell war stuff create catastrophes to alarm the citizen who is minding his own business to go out and fight.

Consider what we eat. Our national food is burger and fries. We kill cows raised in the suffering of a factory. They do not wander the fields and eat grass. We unthinkingly devour them. In our mind, the beef on our plate never lived. Trees in the Amazon are cut down to plant grass for McDonald’s. A couple of rainy seasons and is all is dragged away by the seasonal flood. McDonald’s should have the logo of a desert flying over her inviting doors.

We frack for gas which poisons the water and causes landslides. What we inject in the earth is unknown. It is a corporate secret. We accept a gas pipe being laid alongside the spent fuel pools at Indian Point. In a school where performance counts, someone with this idea would be left back. Instead, we gamble away our safety and secretly accept the death of millions to save a few bucks. Eyes on the prize, we are harbingers of death.

The methane pouring out of the heating up of tundra in Russia which holds onto heat adds to the heating done by gas. All is setting the world on fire. Mother Earth is growing angry at the shredding of Gaia by folk who do not use the enormous energy of the tides and the lesser energy of sun and wind.

Mother Earth is shaking us off with landslides and tornadoes and droughts and floods, with new diseases brought on by its being too warm, too wet by starvation because it’s too dry. Animals and plants die in the heat. Roots rot in the flood. Food is disappearing. Life is clinging but losing its grip. But still we kill our animals to gorge on life; still, we buy clothing made by slaves in China. We grossly overpay our CEO’s and conversely underpay our teachers. We wait for a better tomorrow rather than change our ways today.

Earth will shake us off as a failed experiment. Gaia will recover over millennia. Time means nothing to her.